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how can I delete past bookmarks that have been saved as backups?

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Bookmarks from past dates are saved as backups. How can I delete these back ups?

Bookmarks from past dates are saved as backups. How can I delete these back ups?

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Please explain in more detail what you need and the reason. The bookmarks backups do not display until you need to use them.

If you do not want someone seeing your browsing History and Bookmarks use separate Windows user accounts, and use passwords.

Firefox does keep snapshot backups and those files may be deleted, but you may then have problems should you need to recover bookmarks. Note Firefox has a private browsing feature, that will save bookmarks if you explicitly save them, but it does not save History etc

Note also you may choose what the addressbar displays

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Do you mean the files whose names are similar to

bookmarks-2016-07-15_nnnn_gibberish==.jsonlz4

(where nnnn is the number of bookmarks in the file)

You can modify a setting to reduce the number of backups that are retained if you feel there are too many. However, it's a good idea to keep at least one because if your places.sqlite database -- the file that stores your "live" history and bookmarks -- becomes corrupted, Firefox will need the backup file to restore your bookmarks. (If you use a third party method to back up your bookmarks, then losing your locally stored bookmarks might not be an issue for you.)

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste book and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.bookmarks.max_backups preference and enter the desired value, then click OK.

Note: if you set this to zero, at some point Firefox will delete all the existing files as well as not making any new ones.